incredible satellite photo of our beautiful state [View all]
a snippet of the shot
In the south of the image, you can see Black Canyon of the Gunnison, a gorge so deep that its bottom receives only 33 minutes of sunlight per day.
On September 10, 2015, a satellite named WorldView-3 was whisking on its regular path from pole to pole, locked in orbit 400 miles above the eastern Pacific Ocean.
WorldView-3 is one of the most advanced privately owned Earth-observing satellites in use. Its owned and operated by DigitalGlobe, a corporation that supplies imagery to the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and Google Maps. If youve seen an orbital view of the planet that showed streets and buildings, its likely you were looking at an image captured by WorldView-3 or another DigitalGlobe satellite.
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Since most satellite images are taken looking directly down, few satellite images give this sense of the landscape. Whereas Google Maps is flat and map-like, this shows a planetary surface where hundreds of thousands of people live. Mountains and terrainthe American Rockiesjut up and obscure the land. Canyons disfigure it.
This picture, angled southwest-northeast, captures a huge swath of the state of Colorado: almost everything between Montrose and Fort Morgan.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/12/a-new-kind-of-landscape-photography/421287/?utm_source=SFFB